Its pretty straight forward, KotG is oppressively overpowered in 1.30 and has been taking over games in 1v1 and 4v4 alike. He’s always been a reasonably powerful first hero if just underpicked for cookie cutter DH/Bear/Dryad trends, and combined having solid creeping ability with being a walking entangle dispenser in mid/lategame which snipes units and was a decent hero killing spell, kept in check by the mana costs on his active skills and easily canceled fairly low impact ultimate, largely useless aura and being countered by dispel in lategame. He was a walking entangle, but entangle was a great spell
But with the 1.29-1.30 updates, KotG was overbuffed. Entangle got upgraded to be not just a faster unit sniping spell, but an incredibly strong hero target spell. It went from 125 damage / 5 disable to 210 damage / 7 disable. That 7 duration on 8 cooldown puts it next to hex as the best hero killing spell, it even makes storm bolt look mediocre. Yet at the same time, treants were upgraded to be higher damage / lower cost, making them a viable spell beyond just creeping at level 1, and tranquility was reworked to be much stronger with twice the heal rate and invulnerability, and yet for a hero constrained by mana with 3 active spells- his mana costs got lower, his intelligence got higher, moon wells got buffed to restore more mana.
The only thing keeping KotG in check at all is lategame unit counters from dispel, but this is particularly punishing for UD because they have no dispel until tier 3.5 and their army backbone of fiends is more vulnerable to single target entangles than more spread out 2 food armies like archers / HH. And heck, even for the races that can hit Tier 2.5 and get dispel, HU got priests nerfed and Orc got walkers locked behind an otherwise useless building. KotG needs a bop from the nerf hammer.
KotG nerf on PTR is not enough. No nerf for entangle casted on normal units is the biggest problem. With so many issues you can’t just go with -1 dmg for treants. This is not even close to fixing the overbuff. So many months passed, you got so much feedback that the game is now broken. Half of players on tournaments play NE successfully. It’s so boring to watch NE in every single pro game and even more frustrating to play against them.
Elves are allowed to do anything they want at early game. They can expand and be aggressive at the same time while still massing their overbuffed T1 units. Only thing you can do is to stay at your base and maybe creep the safest spots until T2 and pray NE won’t come with mass hunts or archers with Glaives and Ancient Protectors. This is unacceptable.
You strongly buffed KotG’s every single spell multiple times And also his stats. Some of those changes are out of touch. Like that 3 sec invul on his ultimate. Why only KotG got this? Why Farseer didn’t get invul and the same damage over half of the casting time for earthquake? Or Lich? Or PotM? And Keeper can use all his spells as much as he wants because they very chap on mana and you buffed moonwells regeneration too. I haven’t heard anywhere that moonwells were too weak. Remember that healing from moonwells is for free. It can’t be better than healing scroll or healing salve.
Let me put it this way: Before Kotg meta, Demon Hunter was considered as one of the best heroes in the game. Many claimed that he’s OP.
Because of KotG now Demon Hunter is completely gone. That’s how strong Keeper is.
In last patches you were aiming for more diversity in first hero choice. In the past for NE it was mostly Demon Hunter but also sometimes Warden. Now it’s only Keeper
My suggestion is to decrease damage or duration of entangle and increase its mana cost, remove nature’s blessing effect on treants, revert Tranquility to 1.28.
In my opinion moonwell regeneration should be reverted and Glaives damage nerfed a bit more.